ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF G2B INTERNET PORTALS – A BENCHMARKING APPROACH

Public administrations transform themselves into customer-oriented service providers. Consequently, the availability of G2B electronic services (e-services) is increasing. Within this exploratory paper, we present the status quo of the G2B portals with two research objectives: Firstly, we provide a benchmarking quality assessment with a scoring model and a maturity model. Secondly, we analyse the data empirically from a descriptive and an inferential point of view. The inferential analysis implies microeconomic factors. Hence correlations between and the influence on the quality of G2B e-services and regional economic structures (e.g. GDP growth rate, GDP per Capita, unemployment rate) can be analysed. With these methods, we analyse the offer of G2B e-services in all 27 European capitals and all European cities with more than 500.000 inhabitants. The results show, that the best portal achieves 60 % of the overall scores. Moreover the economic factors only have limited influence over the quality of G2B services. The rising of the directive on services in the internal market, gives a starting point for the results. Our results provide a starting for quality recommendations on the one hand and for further research on the other hand